


In Darkest Winter

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 10:21:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13121736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: On days like this, it was hard to believe that summer was anything but a fairytale.Enjolras and Feuilly, on the run, on the longest night of the year.





	In Darkest Winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FixaIdea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FixaIdea/gifts).



**** On days like this, it was hard to believe that summer was anything but a fairytale.  Dark clouds hung low over the abandoned suburb, dropping a steady torrent of snow that clung to hair and clumped on threadbare boots and drifted through cracks in decaying walls.  The wind was cutting, merciless; even through his four layers Enjolras felt its chill seeping all the way into his bones.

He knew he should be grateful for the snow.  The blizzard that had come down when he and Feuilly ran had covered their tracks and reduced the lines of sight from the compound towers, and they’d only seen a single search party in the days that followed, and that from a great distance.  Even the spirit of the most enthusiastic young guard, eager to prove themself and rise in the ranks, would be dampened by the wind and snow.  (Enjolras would know; he’d been one back before he started asking questions, before he’d been thrown out for having an “Insubordinate Attitude”--only a few months ago, but it felt like years.)  The pursuit, if it continued at all through the plummeting temperatures, would be half-hearted at most.  The winter had saved them.  But it might kill them, too.

Feuilly trudged along ahead of Enjolras, hunched over against the wind, hands clamped under his arms.  His feet dragged in the snow, leaving long ragged trails behind each footprint, but he kept moving, one steady step after another.  A backpack hung from his shoulders, the mostly-empty bag flapping in the fierce wind.

When was the last time they’d spoken to each other?  Enjolras couldn’t remember--maybe it was that morning, when they woke up, snow-blanketed, in the abandoned house they’d slept in that night.  Maybe it was the night before, fumbling half-frozen canned beans into their mouths with numb fingers, trying to ignore the metalic taste.  Maybe it was days ago.

Enjolras stopped and looked up at the sky, sending a clump of snow slithering icily down in neck and along his spine.  Overhead was nothing but gray, endless and changeless.  He couldn’t tell if he was seeing the clouds or just the accumulated grayness of the thousands upon thousands of snowflakes falling toward him.

Looking back down, he realized Feuilly had kept going and was almost invisible in the dim light and blowing snow.

“Feuilly.”  It came out as a croak, and Feuilly didn’t seem hear.  Hitching the straps of his backpack up, Enjolras pushed himself into a jog, tripping over his numb feet in their snow-caked shoes.  He stumbled up beside Feuilly and took his elbow.  

Feuilly just stared at his feet in the snow for a minute, as if he couldn’t understand why they were no longer moving.  Then, slowly, he turned to look at Enjolras.

“It’s getting dark,” Enjolras said.  “We should find somewhere to stop.”

Feuilly nodded.  “Okay.”

It took them a long time to find a place to spend the night.  The street they were on had burned some time back, and the few houses that weren’t blackened skeletons of splintered beams were so badly charred that they looked like they could come down at any moment, especially under the heavy snow.  Where a larger roadway cut through the neighborhood and had cut off the burning, the buildings were mostly commercial shops with huge glass windows that had long since been smashed in.  Finally, they found a series of smaller houses built right up next to each other, where the inner houses seemed to be mostly solid still.  All the doors had been forced in, which was normal, but on one of the better houses the doorframe had broken instead of the door itself, so it could provide at least a small measure of protection against the wind and snow.

Dead leaves rustled under Enjolras’s feet as he slowly shuffled forward, feeling his way along the lightless front hall.  The air smelled stale and sharply cold, with an old, musty scent of wild animals and decaying leaves.  A gentle tug on his coat told him Feuilly was following behind, hanging on to Enjolras’s clothes to stay close.  The wind still howled outside, but in here the noise was a little bit muted.

Some awkward fumbling brought Enjolras and Feuilly to the kitchen, where the dim light coming through the broken back window was enough to allow them to poke through the detitrus of a long-dead era.  Cupboards had been opened and ransacked, and packaging littered the floor, the weathered plastic brittle underfoot.  Without speaking, Enjolras turned left and Feuilly turned right, and both began to slowly search through the refuse for any food that had been overlooked or not considered worthwhile.

Snow so cold it drifted like dry sand had blown in through the window, covering the countertop and half the floor.  Enjolras fumbled through it with clumsy, mittened hands, pushing aside scraps of gnawed plastic and rusty discarded cans.  Nothing but trash on the floor.  Inside the cupboards was little better; some kind of rodents had clearly lived in the cupboards for quite a while, and there was no chance of there being anything edible in their abandoned nest.  Enjolras checked the drawers next, but found only rotten wooden spoons and rusty spatulas.

“Cans.”  Feuilly’s voice, grating and painful, took Enjolras by surprise, sending his heart leaping into his throat.  He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and then turned to help Feuilly sort through the dozen or so cans that had been left behind in the cupboard.  Many of them had rusted through or burst in the cold, but there were four that seemed sound, and Feuilly rolled them into his backpack.

“They’ll be frozen solid.”

“Mm,” Feuilly agreed.

“We can’t eat that.”

“Not tonight.”

“Unless . . . we could make a fire.”

Feuilly just shook his head.  Enjolras knew what he meant, without him having to say it; they’d had the argument several times in the past few days.

_ “It’s too dangerous, especially when it’s so dark out.  They’ll see the light from a mile away.” _

_ “We can put up something to block the light.” _

_ “We can’t stop it all.  Light carries.” _

_ “But we’ll freeze if we don’t have some kind of heat,” was usually Enjolras’s next protest. _

_ “We have each other for body heat.  If we make a shelter from the wind we’ll be all right.”  Feuilly would shrug half-heartedly.  “We’re not going to be comfortable, but we’ll live.” _

But for how long? _  Enjolras never actually asked that question, because it was an answer he didn’t really want to hear.  It made no difference; they were both thinking it anyway. _

_ “Anything is better than being caught by them,” Feuilly would say--in a way, answering the question neither of them would speak. _

_ “We don’t even know if they’re out there.” _

_ Feuilly shook his head.  “They’ll always be out there.  Maybe not close, maybe not looking specifically for us, but they’ll always be there somewhere.” _

Enjolras’s whole body was  _ aching _ with the cold, and he wanted a fire so badly.  But to go through the whole argument again would cost more energy than he was willing to  give, and he knew the outcome already.  So he just nodded toward the door to the living room.

“Let’s find a place to sleep.”

They had a ragged piece of tarp just big enough to make a floor for a shelter.  Enjolras used a moldy broom they’d found in the kitchen to sweep the broken glass and rotten leaves from one corner of the living room, and Feuilly staggered across the room to start dragging an old couch over for a windblock.  Enjolras laid their tarp on the floor and stretched an old sheet above it to trap the minimal warth their breathing would release, tying one corner to a light fixture mounted on the wall, and draping the opposite side over the couch when Feuilly got it across the room.

Feuilly dropped onto the tarp like a stone, breathing heavily.  “All right?” Enjolras asked him.  

He shook his head.  “Dizzy.”

“Maybe because you haven’t eaten anything since yesterday.”  

Feuilly shrugged but didn’t answer.  Enjolras noticed that, though he himself was trembling uncontrolably, Feuilly seemed to have stopped shivering.

“Stay here,” he said.  “I’ll be back.”

Everyone knew that it was stupid to go upstairs in an abandoned building.  The structures were so old, and many of them built shoddily to begin with, and setting foot on the top floor of a building often was just asking to bring it down on your head.  Enjolras, his chest aching with cold, Feuilly’s slurred speech echoing in his mind, found it difficult to care about the danger.

The stairs creaked and groaned as Enjolras put his weight on each step, but they held him up.  Upstairs, Enjolras found a bathroom--tub and toilet full of filthy ice, but a linen closet with some mildewy towels--and two bedrooms.  The signs of animal and human scavengers were everywhere, but they must have been mainly looking for food (and perhaps, in the early days after the collapse, valuables to sell or trade) because Enjolras was able to put together a heaping armful of blankets and a few of the less chewed-up towels.

In the hall, ice crystals crunched under his feet as he made his way back toward the stairs.  His every breath formed a cloud in front of his face, barely highlighted in the dim evening light.  

The window at the top of the stairs had been smashed out some time long ago.  Enjolras paused there for a minute to look out at the abandoned village.  While they’d searched the kitchen and set up their shelter, the snow had finally stopped, and a few patches of clear sky were visible among the gray clouds, scraps of the deepest blue pierced with pure white stars.

With the falling night and the clearing sky, it was getting dangerously cold.  Enjolras could feel it in the dullness of his limbs, in the way his head ached and his ears rang and he had to fight to remember where he was going.  As he looked out over the snow-covered streets, at the tiny points of lights so far away, Enjolras could almost hear the deep freeze settling into the city.  The world had never seemed so indifferent to the tiny flicker of life he carried inside him.

When Enjolras got back downstairs, Feuilly was leaning against the couch, his eyes half closed.

“Hey,” Enjolras said through chattering teeth.  “I found blankets.”

“Whe . . ?” Feuilly slurred.

“They were upstairs.”

Feuilly pushed himself shakily upright.  “Enj’lras, we can’ stay here,” he slurred.  “Have to move on.”

“Why?”

“Too dan’rous.”  He tried to push past Enjolras out of their shelter, but Enjolras caught him across the shoulders.

“Hey, we can’t go.”  He struggled to remember why; thinking seemed to be getting harder and more painful.  “We’ll be okay here.”

“C’mon, Enj . . .”

Enjolras pushed him back inside the makeshift tent.  “We’re staying here.”

“I don’ wan’ . . .”  Even as he protested, Feuilly’s resistance fell away, and he let Enjolras manhandle him onto the tarp.

“We have to get warm,” Enjolras told him, clinging to that thought with all his might: He knew if he lost hold of it, it was over for both of them.  “Take off your shoes, they’re wet.”

“Can’t . . . can’t see ‘em,” Feuilly mumbled.  His voice was getting fainter, and it sent a stab of fear through Enjolras’s heart, flooding his muscles with new energy.  He tore at Feuilly’s shoelaces, but his numb fingers couldn’t untangle the ice-caked laces.  So he just pulled the shoes off altogether, then the wet, threadbare socks.  Feuilly’s face was ashen in the darkness, and his eyes kept falling closed.  Enjolras pulled off his sodden jacket and pants; the clothes underneath were damp as well, but they would have to do because they didn’t have anything else to wear, and Enjolras’s limbs were full of molten lead and he only had enough energy to move them maybe once or twice more.

“Here, get under these,” he said, shoving the blankets toward Feuilly as he started on his own shoes.  Feuilly mumbled something unintelligible, but didn’t make any move toward the blankets.  Enjolras stopped struggling with the buttons on his jacket just long enough to fling the pile of linens more or less on top of Feuilly, then went back, more frantically, to trying to get out of his own soaked clothing.

Even wet and caked with snow, his coat must have been providing some insulation, because when he took it off the night felt colder than ever--a fierce, dark cold that cut deep into his bones and twisted its cruel roots around his heart.  It was the cold of a world that had always wanted to kill you, but now, in the darkest night of winter, had found the leashes untied and the gates unlocked.

He could barely get his feet to move.  He tried to step around the discarded boots, but the message didn’t make it to his feet, and he tripped.  Time skipped a few seconds, and he found himself facedown on the tarp.  Maybe he could just stay there, he thought.  He was so tired, and moving under the blankets seemed more work than was really necessary.

But there was the thinnest thread of something deep in the back of his mind that said  _ no. _ _ You have to. _  With what felt like the greatest effort he’d ever made, Enjolras lifted the edge of the blankets and rolled underneath them.

After maybe a few minutes or maybe an hour, some of the fuzziness cleared from his brain, and he realized how close he had come to dying.  He lay there, breathless with relief, for a minute, then rolled over to check on Feuilly.

Feuilly’s skin was cold to the touch, and he still wasn’t shivering.  When Enjolras said his name, he didn’t answer, and his breath was faint against Enjolras’s wrist.  Enjolras’s numb stupid hands couldn’t feel any pulse in his neck, but when he pressed his hand against Feuilly’s chest, he thought he felt a trace of a heartbeat, weak and fluttery.

“Feuilly . . . come on,” Enjolras pleaded, his own tongue thick and clumsy in his mouth.  “Please.”

Nothing.

He felt around in the darkness for Feuilly’s hand, and found that it was lying outside the blankets.  He pulled it back in at once, rubbing the icy flesh between his own hands.  It took him a minute to remember how haphazardly he’d dumped the blankets on top of Feuilly with his own time running out.

Taking a deep breath, Enjolras crawled out into the biting cold again.  His whole body was still convulsed with shivering, but he managed to spread out the blankets and towels he’d found more evenly.  With the cold clamped around his temples like a vise, he checked to make sure Feuilly’s arms and legs were all safely under the blankets, then wriggled back under himself.

Lying down next to Feuilly, he pressed his chest against his friend’s back, pressed his forehead against the back of his neck.  He wrapped his arms around Feuilly and held him as tightly as his trembling limbs could manage, as if he could transfer energy between them if he could just get close enough.  

And then there was nothing else he could do but wait, in the cold and the darkness, listening to the sound of his own breath, more alone than he’d been in a long, long time.

After a long time--too long--Feuilly stirred uneasily.

“Feuilly?”

Feuilly mumbled something that was half a whimper, and Enjolras muffled a sob in his hair.  “It’ll be okay,” he breathed.  “It’s going to be all right.”

“Enj . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I’m--”  Feuilly’s body was starting to shake, and his chattering teeth mangled whatever it was he said next.  His trembling hand clenched on Enjolras’s.

“Hang in there,” Enjolras murmured.  “It’s going to be okay.”  He wrapped his arms tigher around Feuilly’s chest, and held him as he shivered like he would fall apart.

Enjolras, exhausted to the bone, must have drifted in and out of sleep for some time.  The next thing he knew, he was startled awake by Feuilly coughing violently.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his heart pounding in this throat. 

“Sorry,” Feuilly said faintly.  “It’s dusty under here.”  He was still shivering, but not as violently as before, and his speech wasn’t slurred.  “I tried not to wake you.”

“It’s okay.”  Enjolras shifted, trying to stretch out his stiff limbs without losing any of the almost-warm air they had trapped under the blankets.  “How do you feel?”

“Better.  I . . . I was really out of it, wasn’t I?”

Enjolras nodded against Feuilly’s hair.  “Yeah.  You scared me.”

“Sorry.”  Feuilly shifted under Enjolras’s arm, and his voice sounded louder in the darkness so he must have turned his head toward Enjolras.  “You okay?”

“I think so.  I can feel my hands and feet, except for the left, but I think that one’s asleep.”

To Enjolras’s surprise, Feuilly laughed at that, his voice ringing loud and bright in the dark, stale air.  Enjolras tried to smile in echo, but it felt like a lie on his face.

“Roll over?”  Enjolras did as Feuilly asked, and after a little bit of shuffling, he was curled up on his other side, Feuilly’s chest pressed against his back, rising and falling along with Enjolras’s breathing, Feuilly’s arm wrapped around his side, Feuilly’s warm breath in his ear.  Except for the pins and needles building in his left arm, he was almost comfortable; he was almost-- _ almost _ \--warm.

And to his surprise, that was enough to make the darkness and the danger outside seem overwhelmingly terrible.  Tears sprang to Enjolras’s eyes, and his throat closed over with a sob.  He clenched his hands into fists and tried to even out his breathing, but of course, Feuilly noticed.

“What’s wrong?” he asked anxiously.  “Enjolras, are you okay?”

“We’re not going to make it,” he muttered, and a sob cut off his next words.  “We’re--”  He took a deep, shuddery breath, and tried again.  “It’s all too much.”

“We’re okay,” Feuilly reassured him.  “We’re not warm, but we’re going to make it through the night.”

“And tomorrow?  And the next day?  We can’t do this forever--it’s too cold, and there’s no food, and there’s people trying to kill us, and--and--”  And there was no way out, nothing left to hope for.  A mouldering blanket?  A can of rancid vegetables?  An end to the night?  Reduced to hoping for such  _ nothings _ , things that wouldn’t actually save them, just prolong their misery . . . Enjolras didn’t know how to live like that.  He curled up around the deep ache in his chest and stomach, his shoulders heaving with sobs.

“Hey,” Feuilly said, rubbing Enjolras’s arm.  “You can be scared, it’s okay.  But we’re going to get through this.”  

Unable to speak, Enjolras shook his head.  “One day at a time,” Feuilly insisted. “That’s all you have to do.  We make it through tonight--and we  _ are _ \--and then we see where to go from there.”

“There’s--nowhere to go--we . . . we don’t know anywhere--”

“We’ll keep looking,” Feuilly said firmly.  “Come on, Enj.  When we started this, you were so sure: There’s places in this world still where things are better.  We can find them--or if we can’t, if we’re too far away and the snow is too deep up here, then we’ll make our own place.”  He reached over in the darkness to find Enjolras’s hand, and squeezed it.  

“I . . . don’t think I believe in that anymore,” Enjolras whispered.

“You will again.”  Enjolras could still feel him trembling from the cold, but Feuilly’s voice was steady.  “It’s hard, in the middle of the night, in the cold and the dark,”  he continued.  “It’s hard to believe in anything when you’re just one mistake away from dying.  But Enjolras, the sun  _ will _ come up again, and we’ll have another chance to find what we’re looking for and . . . maybe this time we’ll find it.”

“You really think we will,” Enjolras murmured.

“I do.”  The quiet certainty in his tone gave Enjolras the smallest measure of calm, and he took another deep, shaky breath, squeezing Feuilly’s had.  

Feuilly believed they would make it through--even just hours after almost freezing to death, even with all the guards from their community searching for them, even in the dark of the longest winter night.  Enjolras couldn’t see the light Feuilly was seeing; he couldn’t find the hope Feuilly carried with him.

But just maybe, if he kept tight hold of his hand, he’d be able to see it again one day.


End file.
